London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. Sukhdev Sandhu

Slavery (1789):

      The streets of many towns in this kingdom, and even of this metropolis, are crooked. If our ancestors, who laid out those streets were to be half as much calumniated as the negroes have been, it would probably be asserted, that they could not draw a straight line, between two given points, in the same plane.⁸⁶

      The likes of Edward Long and Samuel Estwick regarded lineality as a metonym for the ability to think straight, to rationalize. Ratiocination being the mark of humanity, Africans couldn’t be human. Long, in his extended discussion of the physical and intellectual similarity between negroes and orang-utans, seems to have come very near to believing this.

      Sancho was well aware that Africans were meant to be innately unlinear and irrational. One of his letters begins with the kind of ironic, grandiloquent agglomeration of a sentence that’s also found in Salman Rushdie’s descriptions of London in The Satanic Verses (1988): ‘You have here a kind of medley, a hetrogeneous illspelt hetroclite, (worse) eccentric sort of a – a –; in short, it is a true Negroe calibash of ill-sorted, undigested chaotic matter.’⁸⁷ Breezily dismissive, Sancho sprays his sentences with dots and dashes to mock the idea that humanity and intelligence are dependent on smooth prosody.

      Secondly, the dashes embodied the flurry and chaos Sancho faced in running an urban grocery. Neither the literary allusions nor the discussions of contemporary culture with which his Letters are studded should blind readers to the fact that he spent the last seven years of his life trying to raise a large family whilst warding off poverty. Corresponding with his friends usually required Sancho to snatch spare moments in between serving customers at the counter: ‘I have a horrid story to tell you about the – Zounds! I am interrupted. – Adieu! God keep you!’⁸⁸ In an earlier letter to Meheux, he noted: ‘Look’ye Sir I write to the ringing of the shop-door bell – I write – betwixt serving – gossiping – and lying. Alas! what cramps to poor genius!’⁸⁹

      The tone of this last remark is comic, but it also shows Sancho to be aware that both his presence among polite company and his aspirations towards becoming a belle-lettrist were regarded as anomalous. In a letter to one of his artist friends he cried, ‘For God’s sake! what has a poor starving Negroe, with six children, to do with kings and heroes, and armies and politics? – aye, or poets and painters? – or artists – of any sort?’⁹⁰ There’s a palpable pride here; the contrast between the ‘starving Negroe’ and ‘kings and heroes’ is a touch overdone and wilfully self-dramatizing. And yet the letter bristles with a genuine anxiety that also emerged less hysterically in an earlier note to the same correspondent; it began with quotations from Young and Shakespeare before lapsing into self-severity: ‘but why should I pester you with quotations? – to shew you the depths of my erudition, and strut like the fabled bird in his borrowed plumage’.⁹¹ The dashes jolt and discombobulate. There’s a stutter here, a nervous tic. Is it appropriate, Sancho seems to be asking, for a mere grocer ever to aspire to join the republic of letters?

      Sancho’s life lacked inevitability. His parents could hardly have expected that either they or their son would be sold into captivity. Nor was it probable that he would elude a life of hard labour under the noonday Caribbean sun by being shipped to England. Few imported slaves had the luck to encounter cicerones such as the Duke of Montagu. Fewer still ended their lives circulating among actors, writers and art connoisseurs while owning property a five-minute walk away from the Houses of Parliament. What’s more, at Montagu House in Greenwich, Sancho spent much of his day working in the servant quarters at the bottom corner of the front courtyard; in Westminster his shop was located on the corner between Charles Street and Crown Court. The dashes embody these discontinuities. In geographic as well as in racial and biographical terms, Sancho always occupied an edgy, recessive status.

      Finally, Sancho, like Sterne, chose to use dashes extensively ‘to mock assumptions about the elegant measured unity of Enlightened discourse’.⁹² Parentheses were condemned by eighteenth-century linguistic theorists for signalling mental incoherence and anti-authoritarianism. The menial status of dashes – they were often used for page numbers – was precisely why Sterne and Sancho, two writers who believed fervently in the importance of helping the stray, the dispossessed and the routinely scorned, were so keen to stud their texts with them. By wedging dashes into almost every line, right at the centre of their prose, they were trying to illustrate their belief that over-polished and over-polite sentence structures reflected an excessively linear, solipsistic way of thinking that not only glossed over quotidian happenstance, but also, at worst, led to the abduction and enslavement of peoples who didn’t conform to such self-designatedly rational structures of thought. Irony, contingency, solidarity – these were the values they preferred to champion.

      In his antepenultimate letter, written a fortnight before his death, when asthma had almost snatched away his last remaining breath and his body was swollen by gout, Sancho asked Spink to forgive ‘the galloping of my pen’ and thanked him for the kindness he’d shown ‘like the Samaritan’s’ over the years: ‘Indulge me, my noble friend, I have seen the priest, and the Levite, after many years’ knowledge, snatch a hasty look, then with averted face pursue their different routes.’⁹³ Here, at the end of his life, when Sancho knew that he was dying, we find him brooding on a parable that he was familiar with from his own study of the Bible as well as the sermons of his beloved Sterne. He compares himself to the helpless roadside victim whose appeals for help were ignored by those travellers racing along the straight highway of self-interest. Only when the Good Samaritan slows down, looks sideways and steps off the beaten track, can he be saved. The dash-strewn, non-linear aesthetic that Sancho lifts from Sterne was similarly designed to stop his correspondent skating too swiftly, too insouciantly over the sentences, and to draw attention to the utterances, the needy existence of the narrator between the clauses.

      Sancho was the first black writer to think of himself as metropolitan. He saw the city not just as a place to live in or to make money, but as a set of values, a tone of voice. At its best it was a form of conversation – learned, sophisticated, playful – in which he felt sufficiently confident to take part. His letters narrate both daily events in the capital (gobbets about trade, politics, entertainment), and, in their different registers (from coquettish gossip and news-chronicling to anomie-wearied cri de coeur), the very sound of the city. Long before George Lamming or V.S. Naipaul, and against the least congenial racial and political backdrop imaginable, Sancho saw London as a cultural centre, one that was the obvious place to be if one were – as he liked to think of himself – a man of letters.

      Someone like Equiano thought of his work in terms of the good it could do; it might raise money and create publicity for the Abolitionist cause. He wrote with a very specific audience in mind. Sancho, though, wrote with few thoughts of publication. He merely sought a brief respite from the routine stresses of running a grocery. This doesn’t mean that his letters weren’t crammed with details of his quotidian, retail existence. They were. But, at the same time, he rejoiced in stylistic reverie to such an extent that we feel it’s only in his letters that he could fully vent his imagination. He was interested in language, in metaphor (his wife ‘groans with the rheumatism – and I grunt with the gout – a pretty concert!’⁹⁴), in literary play. He experimented and fidgeted with grammar and layout. He concocted neologisms. One can feel the delight he felt in both writing and reading his own letters. He himself was aware of this and ended one note, ‘Is not that – a good one?’⁹⁵ Brimming with energy and brio, they often begin with top-of-the-morning exhilaration – ‘Alive! Alive ho!’, ‘Go to!’, ‘Bravo!’ At his best, Sancho is an imp, a freestyler who’s constantly jamming and improvising. He showed that black literature about the city needn’t always